I have a group of “friends” I have known for thirty-five years. “Friends” is in quotes because we mostly just see each other once a year. They are people I cannot quite escape, which is fine, even if I do not talk to them as much or as well as I would like to with “actual” friends.
It bothers me to see how little each of them has changed since we met and to know my change, to them, must look just as scant.
What were we doing with all that time? Why don’t we speak of this more honestly?
You think time will be a teacher, but mostly it is a bore.
Now, as ever, they look disconnected from anything beyond their own worries: family, taking care of the house, the score of the game.
But likely I am just jealous of their material success and of those concerns being more than enough to eat up a life, when a whole bunch of nothing looks to have consumed mine.
And now the way we slip into the rhetorical worries of the day (Covid, Ukraine, the score of the game) and into old and overplayed jokes tells me we prefer anything above looking closely at the mirror we are to one another.